There are many types of owner built homes. I dream of building myself one someday. My favorite is stone but there are straw, cordword and even paper.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Floating Island and house

Well, if you can't afford land to put your house on, you can always build a floating island. "Spiral Island," floated in a lagoon on the East Coast of Mexico south of Cancun from 1998, until it was unfortunately destroyed by Hurricane Emily earlier this year. The island had a two-story house and a sandy beach. It floated on about a quarter million discarded PET plastic water bottles. Start collecting those soda bottles. What's really neat is how the plants and trees grew on it. The roots from the trees combined with the netting holding the bottles and helped to hold it all together. Only problem they had to be constantly adding new bottles, as they deteriorated fairly rapidly.

There are also floating islands in Lake Titicaca in Peru. They have existed for hundreds of years and are made from reeds, but they don't have vegetation growing on them. Of course it's cold up there over 12,000 feet above sea level, so not much grows up there anyhow. The inhabitants also need to be constantly adding to the reeds, as the reeds eventually rot. At least there are no hurricanes up there.

On the opposite end of the scale are the Dubai Palm Islands. Not floating islands but certainly man-made, quite the engineering feat. One of the projects is near completion. Luxury apartments are already selling on ebay.